It must have been eminent-domained when they built the dam, so it's public (state or federal depending on the dam) until the public entity decides otherwise. I should think.

I found a settlement agreement that doesn't control disposition of land but does note intent. I was right that it will be public but wrong about why:

PacifiCorp is the fee owner of approximately 8,000 acres of real property located in Klamath County, Oregon and Siskiyou County, California that is associated with the Klamath Hydroelectric Project and/or included within the FERC project boundary. This property is more particularly described on Page 3 of the PacifiCorp Land Maps, Exhibit 3, and referenced as Parcel B

It is the intent of the Parties that ownership of PacifiCorp lands associated with the Klamath Hydroelectric Project and/or included within the FERC Project boundary, identified as Parcel B in Exhibit 3, shall be transferred to the DRE before Facilities Removal begins. It is the intent of the Parties that, once the DRE has completed Facilities Removal and all surrender conditions have been satisfied, ownership of these lands will be transferred to the respective States, as applicable, or to a designated third-party transferee, upon Notice by the relevant State that it has completed to its satisfaction a final property (land and facilities) inspection in accordance with Applicable Law and in accordance with the indemnification(s) provided in Section 7.1.3 and Appendix L. It is also the intent of the Parties that transferred lands shall thereafter be managed for public interest purposes such as fish and wildlife habitat restoration and enhancement, public education, and public recreational access.

The Tribes (Yurok and Karok) have taken on the restoration project for the Klamath River. I'll be surprised if they don't end up managing those lands.

The Tribes have been saving local seed and growing seedlings for years in preparation for when the dams were finally removed.

There was a great article on the restoration of the Elwha River that had cool slider bars for before and after that I'm trying to find.

I didn't know what DRE meant so I looked it up, and I have to say "Department of Real Estate" is much more job-descriptive than "Department of the Interior" is.

"Dam Removal Entity" or "DRE" is the Klamath River Renewal Corporation, which will be the entity responsible for Facilities Removal under this Settlement.

Looks like I forgot about DRE.

"Dams, ready to earth"

Dams are literally current affairs.

ITIMHOB, the dam we used to drink beer at failed because of an ice storm and killed the guy who owned the bar/bait shop.

I don't think you can blame salmon.

Probably best to locate your bar above the dam. Just in case.

10 is nonsensical. Every schoolchild knows ice is lighter than water.

Sharper, though.

Sharp, like insurance fraud gone wrong.

12: The roadv was below the dam, which didn't work welln for the bridge.

That's the bridge's story, but clearly it had had a few.

I will be fascinated to see the ten-years-later on how the restoration went. I am sometimes peripherally responsible for that sort of restoration on a much smaller scale, and I have no idea what kind of results we're actually going to get on the projects I'm involved in.

When I said 9 in the last thread, no pun was intended. So 9 adds value.

18: There's been some amazing fish responses to a dam being taken out in Maine. Like within a year or two of removal they were seeing fish moving upstream. Ditto in the Great Lakes. Terrestrial stuff is slower but I bet those flooded areas are full of nutrients (and prob will require more invasive species maintenance than anything else).

I wonder if they'll bring back beavers? Two steps forward, one step back.

To braid threads, one the things that struck me in OP2 was the need to replant rapidly after flood recession, while the ground was still wet. More bad news for Kakhovka (and the many smaller blown dams in Ukraine).

This seems like the right thread to drop this: https://thepulp.org/lost-in-the-woods/

On the one hand, the end of the timber economy means cleaner air, and maybe tones down the culture war a notch. On the other hand, it is actually important to cut down some trees, and if you can't sell any of the wood to recoup your costs, that gets pretty expensive.

"Dam Removal Entity" or "DRE" is the Klamath River Renewal Corporation, which will be the entity responsible for Facilities Removal under this Settlement

IS IT TOO LATE FOR ME TO SUBMIT A COMPETING PROPOSAL

23: Interesting. To my mind:
1. Bet on mass timber, as the piece mentions.
2. Burn the wood for carbon-neutral power/heat.
3. Bury the wood for carbon credits (handy local open-cast mines repurposed).
4. 2+3, burn the wood to charcoal and bury it.
5. The premise is false: the requirement for forest management logging won't necessarily persist, it may decline to a much lower plateau if large enough areas are converted to fire-adapted ecosystems.

Separately:

they remain beloved institutions in their respective communities, where taking care of their employees is a non-negotiable part of doing business.

*Very inefficient for power, especially with cost of haulage to to a thermal plant big enough to be efficient. District heating? Hybrid charcoal pile/thermal batteries? I want such things to exist, even if they don't make sense.

Small family-owned mills in small towns like Seeley Lake are different from the industrial scale institutions that are now gone from here.

Also:

a lot of outdated infrastructure, which is more cost effective to replace with automation
[...]
nearly half of their workforce is at or approaching retirement age

Well, yeah. The difference in the timber industry in the Missoula area between when I was first here in 1978 and today is really quite something.

WRT Seeley Lake, I had a friend who was on the community council there for many years: I didn't follow it all that closely, but after years of effort they voted down -- the citizens overwhelmingly voted down -- a sewage treatment plant that was going to get a lot of federal money, but also a substantial amount of local property tax money too. The upshot is that pretty much nobody gets to build new housing, because septic systems will pollute the groundwater and even the lake. I see that they're trying again; maybe this time folks there will vote for it. Probably not, though.

Everyone wants primo services, nobody wants to pay for it. One district in the far outer East Bay kept voting against funding its own damn fire department! (It eventually merged with the county's.)

Before or after they burned down in a wildfire?

28: Burn the sewage in the charcoal pile! I have all the answers!

Many years ago, I lived in a house with limited water, and we had a propane toilet. It really burned the shit. The fan broke one day, and we had some unpleasant smoke.

Wait. What?

The fan broke, so the smell of burning shit was not sucked out of the house.

Fortunately, Charley had already struck a match to light the toilet, so no-one noticed.

It was a ridiculously impractical little house, down in a draw about 15 miles from town. 150 steps down from the parking area to the house: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/845-Whispering-Pines-Dr-Billings-MT-59101/2093302695_zpid/?mmlb=g,12. We had a cistern for water -- a truck came out every now and then. We slept in the loft: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/845-Whispering-Pines-Dr-Billings-MT-59101/2093302695_zpid/?mmlb=g,5

We lived there in 1985/86.

It looks like there's a composting toilet there now. You couldn't have septic down in that draw, and I wouldn't imagine city water/sewer getting there in my lifetime.

2. Burn the wood for carbon-neutral power/heat.

Unfortunately, no. 2.5x natural gas. 1.3x coal. Plus the loss of the carbon sink in the forest.

colleagues of mine worked on the klamath dam removal for many years, it is a tremendous achievement!

38: I was really surprised to see that had been written by a professor, because it read in style and content like something written by a middling school child. Doesn't he understand the concept of life cycle emissions? The idea that burning wood means that someone is growing the wood for you to burn, who would not otherwise have done so?